Deploy Printer Drivers Script
Software Deployment Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) Group Policy Driver Deployment Hi, I have a few clients (4) out of the 3000+ estate,that use Card printers. How would you recommend I deploy these drivers to the 4 users, there are 3 models of the printers between them.
Today we’re going to go over a quick method to deploy print queues and printer drivers to multiple machines when other deployment methods, including deploying via GPO are not feasible. We’re going to use PsExec from Windows SysInternals in combination with some PrintUI.DLL commands. If you’re not familiar with PrintUI.DLL, it is the file that contains the different functions used by the printer configuration dialogs. Pdf To Html5 Converter Php. So without further ado, let’s get started The first thing we need to do is determine what systems we want to push the printers and drivers to. In our example, we’re going to create a local folder on the C: drive called DEPLOY.
Inside the C: DEPLOY folder, we create a simple text file with a list of the machines – one per line. If you’re comfortable with scripting, the odds are that you’ve used a file like this in your scripting adventures.
We save the file as COMPUTERS.TXT. The file itself looks like this. COMPUTERNAME1 COMPUTERNAME2 COMPUTERNAME3 etc Once we have our list of systems, we set it aside and compile our list of print queues and printer drivers that we want to create on our target machines.
For this, we’re going to create a file called PRINTUI.CMD in our C: DEPLOY folder. For each printer or driver we want to deploy, we create a corresponding line in our PRINTUI.CMD file – for example: RUNDLL32 PRINTUI.DLL, PrintUIEntry /ia /f%windir% inf ntprint.inf /m “HP LaserJet 4” Let’s break down this command and look at each piece of it: • /ia – install a printer driver using a.inf file • /f [file] – either.inf file or output file. When adding in-box drivers, use ntprint.inf as in our example above • /m [model] – printer driver model name. In our example, we’re specifying the HP LaserJet 4 Digressing for a moment, if we were going to use PrintUI.DLL to install a local printer, our syntax would look like this: RUNDLL32 PRINTUI.DLL, PrintUIEntry /if /f%windir% inf ntprint.inf /b “Printer1” /m “HP LaserJet 4” /u /r “LPT1:” /Z Let’s take a quick look at some of the differences in our syntax: • /if – install a printer driver using a.inf file • /b [name] – base printer name.
Creating A Windows Printer Driver. In our example, we are calling the printer “Printer1” • /u – use the existing printer driver if it is already installed • /r [port] – port name – in our case LPT1 • /Z – share the printer. You can only use this switch with the /if option If we add the /y switch, we can specify that printer as the default printer Getting back to our deployment scenario, we’re going to deploy a locally attached HP LaserJet 4 printer to each of our target machines with the following settings: • Printer Name = Printer1 • Port = LPT1 • The printer must be shared out So, within our PRINTUI.CMD file we have the following entries. Rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /ia /f%windir% inf ntprint.inf /m “HP LaserJet 4” rundll32 printui.dll PrintUIEntry /if /f%windir% inf ntprint.inf /b “Printer1” /m “HP LaserJet 4” /u /r “LPT1:” /Z rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /y /n “printer1” Note: The first line is not actually required in our example, but we left it in our example to demonstrate how you can use the command to deploy drivers. The printer driver itself is installed in the second line with the /m switch that looks inside the ntprint.inf file to find the HP LaserJet 4 driver.
Now that we have our list of computers, and we know what the requirements are for the remote machines, we’re ready to use PsExec to carry out our deployment. The syntax for this command is: PSEXEC @C: DEPLOY COMPUTER.TXT –i –n 20 –u DOMAIN USER –c C: DEPLOY PRINTUI.CMD There are some new pieces of syntax here – let’s examine them: • @file – directs PsExec to run the command on each computer listed in the specified text file • -i – run the program so that it interacts with the desktop of the specified session on the remote system. If no session is specified then the process runs in the console session. We include this option so that we can see any errors the process might generate on the remote system • -n – specifies the timeout in seconds for remote computer connections • -u – specifies the user name to use when connecting to the remote system • -c copies the specified program to the remote system for execution.